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Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

Jane Yolen

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Jane Yolen
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: February 11
Editor
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Jane Hyatt Yolen
Jane Hyatt Yolen Stemple
Jane H. Yolen Stemple
Story
Clothe
Read
Suit
Write
Shirts
Stories
Readers
Need
Suits
Needs
Reader
Writing
Simply
Create

More quotes by Jane Yolen

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Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.
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Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.
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Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.
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Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
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Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.
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If you love a waist, you waste a love.
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It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.
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I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.
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You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.
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Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.
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Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.
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A shadowless man is a monster, a devil, a thing of evil. A man without a shadow is soulless. A shadow without a man is a pitiable shred. Yet together, light and dark, they make a whole.
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Touch magic. Pass it on.
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A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?
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Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.
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Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.
Jane Yolen
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If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.
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Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.
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What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.
Jane Yolen
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They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.
Jane Yolen